About a month ago, right around the time that I, along with all the other editors of The Niche, abruptly and for no particular reason gave up on The Niche, I got into the FXX sitcom It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. And if you know me, you know this: when I stan, I stan.

I didn’t write but one word for The Niche in March, but I wrote 41,000 words of Mac/Dennis fanfiction. Mac/Dennis is everything. It is The Dynamic. It is canon. It is eternal. It is all that is pure and holy. I don’t remember who I was before I saw Glenn Franklin Howerton III’s flabby naked Juilliard-trained ass stalk across the lawn of his and Mac’s suburban home while screaming a Shakespearean monologue at their poor, unassuming neighbour. These hands only know how to ship Mac/Dennis now.

So, that being said, here are six homoerotic promotional photos of Mac and Dennis from the ninth season of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia that are more satisfying than all the sex I have had in my 23 years of life on this Earth.

1.

We’ll start off with this beauty, which, in keeping with the photoshoot’s Ingmar Bergman theme, is a visual reference to the 1953 film Sommaren med Monika, a coming-of-age romance that was released in the United States as Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl and marketed as pornography, presumably because the protagonist does shit like this while cavorting about with her boyfriend in the Stockholm archipelago on a stolen boat:

So here, Dennis is assuming the exact same pose as Monika, while Mac – in the background, soft focus between Dennis’s legs – holds a phallic fishing rod. This photographer is quite literally superimposing Mac and Dennis’s homoerotic relationship onto a heterosexual cinematic narrative.

Is this picture more satisfying than all the sex I’ve ever had?

Yes. Looking at this picture is more satisfying than the time I went on a dinner date with a girl I met on Tinder, invited her back to my place to Netflix and Chill, and then skipped right to Chilling as an emergency measure after I pulled up Netflix and she suggested we watch American Dad.

2. 

Same shit, slightly different angle and composition, somehow even more homoerotic. Shall I compare thee to this classic painting by iconic homoerotic impressionist Henry Scott Tuke?

Uncanny, right? It’s very possible – likely, even – that the Always Sunny marketing team was cribbing from Ingmar Bergman and Tuke’s Victorian era painterly fissure of gender and sexual regulations in order to better market their show about lighting shit on fire and eating cat food.

Is this picture more satisfying than all the sex I’ve ever had?

Yes. Looking at this picture is more satisfying than the time my partner bought a strap-on and we were both really excited about it until we finally gave it a shot and found out that it just wasn’t gonna happen for us no matter how much lube we used and we both got covered in this really nasty-smelling lube so we had to go take a shower together. And, okay, what happened during that shower was pretty satisfying, but still not as satisfying as the stirring in my loins when I look at this picture of Dennis reclining on the front of a boat while Mac goes phallus-fishing in soft focus a few feet behind him.

3-6.

Is this sequence of pictures more satisfying than all the sex I’ve ever had?

Yes.

Are these pictures more satisfying and evocatively romantic than every heterosexual love scene in the history of cinema, photography, and art?

Yes.

Why the fuck did the producers of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, a cable sitcom about lighting shit on fire and eating cat food, choose to promote their show with these photographs?

It’s unclear.

Is Dennis a power bottom?

Do you even have to ask?